Amanda Blevins

I have many conversations about IT Transformation. For the most part, everyone is in agreement, nodding their heads, and saying, “You’re preaching to the choir”. With all of these technology folks on board, why aren’t more companies building out third generation architectures and creating third platform applications?

It all comes down to one thing: Money. IT is usually not a revenue-generating group; more often it is a budget black hole. The roadblock to deploying new technology is IT’s status of a cost center rather than an innovator and contributor to the company’s profitability. New possibilities mean IT can rise above its cost center status. But, this is a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. The lines of business must trust us to make the right decision. But usually, they don’t see how these technologies correlate to drilling more oil, selling more merchandise in a store, increasing wealth management, etc. This is why we must education them in their own language.

We must stop speaking about technology and widgets to these groups. Their eyes will gloss over at words like Cloud Management System and Software-defined. Instead we must think of terms of what is important to them - reduced cost and increased speed. If we can truly provide this in a tangible way to the business, they will be our allies.

For example, a retail store cares nothing about self-service provisioning and highly virtualized data centers. But as soon as you say, I can help you open the new location 30 days faster than the last and at half the cost, now they are listening.

The difficult aspect of gaining buy-in for this new approach is trust that we can deliver. Budget must be allocated for the self-service project. But how do we prove the worth without the dollars to begin? Everyone will want to use it once it is built, but no one wants to take the risk of funding the implementation. Below are my methods for kick-starting a rollout of a new concept.

1. Find a “Friendly”

Enlist a business or application partner who will take a chance on you and a new technology. There will be at least one proponent of leaping into the future in the application side of the house. Usually, you have helped this person in a previous project, and she sees the value you can bring to the table.

2. Understand the Friendly’s Next Project

She is probably trying to achieve something new and great as well. She might also be having a hard time getting the resources for the project or require technology that isn’t readily available in the current environment. Show how your project will speed up the delivery of hers. For example, if the Friendly believes that developing a new website or mobile application will unlock billions of dollars in revenue, connect the dots on how a self-service portal will allow her to develop on any platform she wants, instantly, without waiting the ten days for a request ticket to go through or swiping a credit card at AWS.

3. Uncover “Keep the Lights On” Expenses

Another type of Friendly is the budget owner. This one may even be more powerful than the first. Statistics show that 70-80% of an IT budget is spent on keeping the lights on versus innovation. If the new technology can reduce that spend by 5-10% that is a huge win. Sit down with this VP to understand line item by line item how the budget is spent in maintenance activities. This can be a support contract for solutions that can be removed due to redundancy, labor costs associated with break/fix, or replacing older technology on a one to one basis without improvement. Create a matrix that shows how these numbers are reduced via specific technology capabilities. Armed with this information it will be easy to show how the project can be self-funded and lower costs for the organization year over year.

4. Agree to Success Criteria

Your Friendly is your best chance at proving the new way is the best way. She might not understand what it is you will be able to provide and ask for things that seem blatantly unreasonable. However, it isn’t malicious behavior on her part. She is now a kid in a candy store and wants anything her imagination conjures. It is important to clearly define the features of the new services. Be very specific about what it can and cannot do in the proof of concept phase. I do suggest painting the picture of the final vision, but keep her within the guardrails so she can be your advocate upon a successful completion.

5. Request Good Press

After a job well done, it is imperative your Friendly sings your praises. Create a project write-up and presentation to outline the specific and tangible benefits you both experienced as a result of this new technology and methodology. Share this will leadership and request an audience with the CTO and CIO. Be prepared with a business plan on how this will help the larger organization, not just the single use case from test. Also, use informal lines of communication. You want your Friendly to be the advocate for this new technology with her lines of business coworkers. Illustrating how quickly she was able to begin coding in her brand new development environment, free of all the restrictions of “old IT” will be of large benefit to you. Larger numbers requiring the same level of service are harder to ignore.

6. Have a Plan for Production

In addition to the business plan mentioned above, it is important to identify the steps for a quick rollout of the new platform. If the momentum is continued, there is a higher likely-hood of success. If the technology is not implemented quickly, the folks who were on board will look for similar possibilities outside of IT. Often this will be found in the ungoverned public cloud. If they believe their needs are met, justification for implementation is once again difficult. And the issue of rogue clouds are introduced or increased, which create management difficulties for IT in general.

The above steps illustrate the effectiveness of an application and business centric approach of IT. We are now measured on innovation gained, not just cost avoidance. However, without attention to dollars spent, we cannot gain the support of the business to move forward with the deployment of cloud technologies.